Thirteen was a big year for Bubba Weiler. It was the age he was on track to become a professional tennis player when a stray ball blinded his right eye and forced him to take a year off. “I fell way behind,” he says. “It was earth-shattering.” It was also the year, after a requisite period of sadness, that Weiler decided to try something new. He began taking voice lessons and, before long, was working as a child actor in nearby Chicago. An all-boys Catholic military high school was next for him, but there, he says, “theater saved me.”
Thirteen, then, was the start of a new life for Weiler—one that has led him, 20 years later, to New York’s Atlantic Theater Company, where his new play, The Saviors, premiered this week. It chronicles a few days in the lives of two eighth-grade altar boys, best friends preparing to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. “The play is about really well-intentioned people trying to save each other, both with and away from God,” Weiler says. “It’s about my time as a queer kid growing up in a pretty conservative, Catholic atmosphere. It’s sort of me wrestling with the faith that I grew up in, trying to hold the beauty of the faith and community, and the pain of it, at the same time.”
